| The Heart of Learning: Spirituality in Education Edited by Steven Glazer Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam 1994 |
Parker J. Palmer
Good teaching isn’t about technique. I’ve asked students around the country to describe their good teachers to me. Some of them describe people who lecture all the time, some of them describe people who do little other than facilitate group process, and others describe everything in between. But all of them describe people who have some sort of connective capacity, who connect themselves to their students, their students to each other, and everyone to the subject being studied.
I heard about one young woman who said she couldn’t possibly describe her good teachers because they were all so different from each other, but she could easily describe her bad teachers because they were all the same: “With my bad teachers, their words float somewhere in front of their faces like the balloon speech in cartoons.” Here is an extraordinary image which tells us that bad teaching involves a disconnect between the stuff being taught and the self who is teaching it.
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Buddhist Education: The Path of Wisdom and Knowledge
The Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche
According to Buddhadharma, the fundamental state of consciousness – the basic state of our minds – is completely pure. This basic purity is called Buddha nature. Thus, the ground, or basis, of learning in Buddhism is the view that the nature of our mind, not matter who or what we are, is fundamentally pure. The goal of Buddhist education is the bringing about of the full understanding and realization of this basic mind: the mind which has been fundamentally pure and fully awakened from the beginning. Education is then understood to be like a mirror that allows us to glimpse and recognize our own face: our true nature, our original purity. The practices of education, the various steps that we take, are simply the application of different tools, techniques, and studies that help us reach this ultimate goal.
Along the path of uncovering this heart of enlightenment, there are many different processes that we go through. We deal with our ignorance. We deal with our emotions. We deal with all the negative aspects of our mind states. According to Buddhadharma, every experience that we go through is a creation of our mind. In this tradition, there is no outer creator who is responsible for our particular circumstances, situations, experiences – or even our liberation! Because of this, on the path of Buddhist education, there is no such idea of worshipping or relying on any kind of outer entity existing outside of mind.
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The Dalai Lama: Education and the Human Heart
What is the purpose of our life? Of course, I believe that it is happiness. Our culture, our education, our economy – all human activities – should be meant for that goal. Nothing else. However, although we often assume that certain activities will enable us to achieve this goal of happiness, in reality, we are often deceived by our own ignorance or shortsightedness. . . .
Therefore, in order to eliminate ignorance, education, no doubt, becomes very important. But even as knowledge can be very helpful, I think a good heart, a warm heart, can expel this shortsightedness. If one looks at a very particular or limited area, and says, “I am only responsible for this much” – and does not bother to consider the consequences of one’s actions on the larger community – this is where problems begin. However, by keeping this in mind, and actually taking care of others – the larger community – we can eliminate the various problems that arise from narrow-mindedness, shortsightedness and extreme selfishness.
Page 87
From my rough impression of the Western educational system, although it is very impressive to see the high standard of the facilities, the many material resources, and the perfection of so many different aspects of intellectual development, the thing that seems to be lacking is the dimension of enhancing and developing the heart. The questions we must ask are how to promote these other human values. How to teach the development of a good heart?
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Ron Miller
Modern schooling does not serve the spiritual unfoldment of the child. It serves capitalism, nationalism, and a reductionist worldview. It serves a society that is completely committed to meritocracy, where there’s fierce competition between individuals to the reach the top of a social hierarchy.
In my historical research I found a quotation from 1908 that captures the essence of this system. A man named Colin Scott wrote a book called Social Education, in which he promoted the concept of “social efficiency” in public education:
It is not primarily for his own individual good that the child is taken from his free and wandering life of play. It is for what society can get out of him, whether of a material or spiritual kind, that he is sent to school.
In recent years another term has come to be used by the leaders of our educational system, the term intellectual capital. This term suggests that the minds of our children are raw material for the economy. This unfortunately, is what schools are primarily about in this present age.
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The Canadian education theorist, John P. Miller, who has written wonderful books on holistic education, has said that education should be about transformation. Education should be supporting this process of evolution. It should not be exclusively concerned with the transmission of what has already been established in our culture. Johann Pestalozzi in Switzerland beautifully expressed this in 1809:
God’s nature which is in you is held sacred in this house. We do not hem it in. We try to develop it. It is far from our intention to make of you men and women such as we are. Under our guidance you should become men and women such as your natures, the divine and sacred in your nature, require you to be.
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I have my own fantasy that one day thousand of Rosa Parkses will emerge in our schools – and that they will simply refuse to administer another standardized test. That one day teachers will simply refuse to trim down their curriculum and make it conform to the mechanical and standardized curriculum that comes down from IBM and the State Department of Education. But his civil disobedience will have to be performed on a massive scale. If any one teacher tries to do this on their own, they are sure to be out of a job; and we need you in there.